1 robot will replace six human jobs, Automation is a 'national emergency' and more on the future of work

Robots and jobs

You probably saw at least one of the many headlines last week about a new report out about the future impact of automation on the U.S. economy. Most stories focused on one stat: For every robot put in place per thousand workers, up to six workers will lost their jobs and wages will go down. I took a look at the 91 pages of research and pulled out some other key findings:

• As many as 57% of jobs could be automated over the next two decades, but this stat assumes automation will be cheaper than human labor, encouraging employers to use it.
• The U.S lags behind its European peers in the adoption of robots in the workplace: In the late 2000s, there were 2.6 robots per thousand workers across developed European economies and only 1.4 robots in America per one thousand workers. 
• Men will likely be impacted more than women by mass adoption of robots: They will likely lose more work, however the decreases in wages for men and women will be the same. 
• The manufacturing industry will be most impacted by exposure to robots and there will be very few employment increases across other occupations to offset this decrease.
• Managers are the only occupation title that the researchers said would not be negatively impacted by robots.
• Workers with less than a high school degree, a high school degree and some college will see the most negative impact on employment and wages thanks to robots. The only group not hit in the researchers' exercise was workers with post-college degrees.
• Robots in America will quadruple by 2025 to 5.25 more robots per thousand workers leading to a nearly 2 percentage points decrease in employment, according to one very aggressive model. 

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Nothing to fear. GE's Jeff Immelt thinks Silicon Valley has over-hyped the idea that robots are going to steal all of our jobs. [Axios] 

Behind, but hit the worse. While the U.S. is adopting robots at a slower rate that Europe, the U.S. economy will be hit hardest by automation because we have a higher share of workers currently in roles that robots will eventually take over. [Recode]

Robots for evil, not good. This feature by Maureen Dowd on how Elon Musk is trying to prevent the "AI apocalypse," is a must read. My only complaint: The only woman she managed to interview on this huge trend in tech was Elon's ex-wife. [Vanity Fair]

But who will pay? A majority of Americans agree that workers should get paid parental leave, but disagree on what role the government should play in providing that leave. [NYTimes] 

Clean up on Aisle 1! Amazon delayed the opening of its first cashierless store after it reportedly became clear that its tech couldn't support more than 20 customers in the shop at the time. [WSJ]

Machines picking stocks. Blackrock -- the world's largest asset manager -- is relying more and more on robots over humans in buying and selling stocks. [NYTimes]

The next big things. Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Denver, Salt Lake City, Portland, Dallas, Raleigh-Durham, Worcester and Philadelphia are experiencing the most startup growth outside of the big hubs. [Axios]

Prove it. Iceland became the first country to propose legislation that would require employers to prove they are paying men and women equally. [NYTimes]

Uber's diversity numbers. They finally came clean with them, but according to my reporting, senior leaders tried to keep the extent of the problem secret for years. I encourage you to check out the hundreds of interesting comments we had on the platform last week about #UberDiversityReport: 

On-demand myths, debunked. The majority of on-demand workers had at least a two-year college degree, making them more educated than the overall American population. [Intuit's Alex Chriss]

AI not a threat. The "technologies that drive automation, like machine learning and artificial intelligence, can be used to retrain and 'up-skill' displaced employees" [Emergence Capital's Jake Saper]

A national emergency. The automation of work should be considered a national emergency because the U.S. has more workers employed in positions that require routinized tasks than basically any other developed country. [Michael Spencer]

Dear Google. Not all Black software engineers went to Howard University, so why not extend your new campus program to Black students across colleges? [Louis Byrd]

What about happiness? It's clear robots are going to take over a lot of work in the future providing humans with more leisure time, but what will our purpose be once everything in our lives is automated? [Praiseworthy's Misa Chien]

Musings from our economist, Guy Berger, on what we really mean when we say "Middle America":